Derek B. Miller > Quotes

“Only the educated stop to look for words - having enough to occasionally misplace them.”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“Everyone gets killed in the shower. Don't you go to the movies? Psycho. Dead in shower. The MExican in No country for Old Men. Dead in shower. Michelle Pfeiffer in What Lies Beneath. Almost dead in shower, or in the bath, anyway. But she did that thing with her toe and got out OD. Still the shower, though...Glen Close in Fatal Attraction. Dead in shower. John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. Very dead in shower. But never closets. I can't think of anyone shot in a closet. This is why I hide in closets.”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“This country is what you make it. You understand that? It isn’t good and it isn’t bad. It’s just what you make it. That means you don’t make excuses for America’s bullshit. That’s what the Nazis and commies do. The Fatherland. The Motherland. America isn’t your parent. It’s your kid. And today I made America a place where you get your nose broken for telling a Jew he can’t play a round of golf. The only one allowed to tell me I can’t play golf is the ball.”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“There's also a possibility that the landlord is in there right now, wearing women's undergarments. Or a drug addict is inside stealing jewelry.Or a boatload of recent Chinese immigrants without a television watching Russia play Finland in hockey and placing bets over beer.

You have no idea what's behind that door. You can't just pick the options within your field of vision. Reality comes from everywhere. At best, you can narrow down the likelihoods. But in the end, it's not a matter of deduction. It's a matter of fact. One bullet will kill you if you're stupid or unlucky. So at least don't be stupid”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“it is all clearer now than it was then. Rhea would say it is the vivid fabrications of an ageing mind. More likely, though, it is the clarity that comes from ageing - from the natural process of releasing the mind from imagined futures, and allow the present and paste to take their rightful place at the centre of our attention. The past is palpable to Sheldon now, in the way the future is to the young. It is either a brief curse or a gift before oblivion.”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“We actually do have a lot of guns. There's a lot of hunting in Norway. But there's almost no gun violence."
"Why do you think that is?"
"On a fundamental level," says Sigrid, "I think it's because we don't want to shoot each other."
"That could be our problem right there," says Melinda”
― Derek B. Miller, American by Day

“You know the Norwegian police? They're a bunch of pussies. They don't carry guns, just like the English. But they stay after things for years and years, nagging and nagging. They're like herpes. You think you're rid of them, and then, when you're a little stressed out, boom! In the end they catch all the killers. They exhaust their prey into submission.”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“Only the educated stop to look for words—having enough to occasionally misplace them.”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“He expresses himself not in a torrent of words and ideas and disruptions, revelations and setbacks, but through an ever-expanding capacity to face what comes next.”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“clarity that comes from aging—from the natural process of releasing the mind from imagined futures, and allowing the present and the past to take their rightful place at the center of our attention. The”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“The problem with arguing ideas with your children,” says her father, “is that you start wondering what the conversation is really about. Your child can talk about Kierkegaard but as a parent you start thinking, ‘This kid needs a hug and a nap.’ The older I get the more I suspect this is true for everyone. It is astonishing the things we think about to keep ourselves from thinking about things.”
― Derek B. Miller, American by Day

“when McCain chose that reason-impaired bimbo from Alaska to be his running mate even Irv had to get off the GOP elevator”
― Derek B. Miller, American by Day

“At his age, it can be overwhelming and painful to harbor a thought accompanied by too much nostalgia. Not that he wanted to. Mabel, in her final years, had stopped listening to music. The songs of her teenage years brought her back to people and feelings of that time - people she could never see again and sensations that were no longer coming. It was too much for her. There are people who can manage such things. There are those of us who can no longer walk, but can close our eyes and remember a summer hike through a field, or the feeling of cool grass beneath our feet, and smile. Who still have the courage to embrace the past, and give it life and a voice in the present. But Mabel was not one of those people. Maybe she lacked that very form of courage. Or maybe her humanity was so complete, so expansive, that she would be crushed by her capacity to imagine the love that was gone.”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“Without a future, the mind turned back in on itself. That’s not dementia. One might even say it’s the only rational response to the inevitable.”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“Most things are both true and absurd.”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“. The liberals expounded limitless tolerance, the conservatives were racist or xenophobic, and everyone debated from philosophical positions but never from ones grounded in evidence, and so no sober consideration was being given to the very real question now haunting all of Western civilization—namely, How tolerant should we be of intolerance?”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“The light is off, and it is dark. He has one hand pressed against the cold tiles of the wall above the toilet, and with his other hand he is taking aim, such as it is. He’s waiting for his prostate to get out of the way so he can take a well-deserved leak and get back to bed where he belongs, so that if by chance his heart stops this very second, he won’t be found—holding his pecker, dead on the floor—by a bunch of twenty-year-old medics who will gawk at his circumcision and bad luck.”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“Don’t get old,” he says to Paul. “If Peter Pan shows up, just go.”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“It’s hard to ignore the moose sitting on your waffle.” “What?” “That might not translate.”
― Derek B. Miller, American by Day

“God made the world, said it was good,” says Sheldon aloud. “Fine. But when did he reappraise?”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“Things can’t last unless they begin. Worry about duration after commencement.”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“Norway. A gift to the wandering tribes who pressed ever northward into the sea-split orchestral tumult of salty shores and cragged earth sheltering the gods that time forgot. Wine spilling like children through empty halls echoing waiting, neverly for distant guests, the fire and song rising, still and bright into the ever darkening sky. A proclamation to the eternal night. A chorus of candles and spice. We . . . they say. Children of the norlands, with fathers buried in this earth’s cradle. All memory conspiring to a single story— This . . . they say. This is our land.”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“That’s America’s paradox—your individualism is a strong cultural trait that weakens you as a community and you just can’t see it.”
― Derek B. Miller, American by Day

“I’m starting to think,” he eventually continued, “that maybe we leave parts of ourselves behind in certain situations—some essential piece of ourselves that we have to cut off, otherwise there’s no way out. The future becomes a kind of journey to discover what you might actually have left behind and what you’re supposed to do about it. It’s more than trauma. It’s like a phantom limb, but with a piece of your soul.”
― Derek B. Miller, The Girl in Green

“It is summer and luminous.”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“It is all clearer now than it was then. Rhea would say it is the vivid fabrication of an aging mind. More likely, though, it is the clarity that comes from aging—from the natural process of releasing the mind from imagined futures, and allowing the present and the past to take their rightful place at the center of our attention. The past is palpable to Sheldon now, in the way the future is to the young. It is either a brief curse or a gift before oblivion.”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“What we’re up against now is a conservative movement anchored in a way of seeing Americanness that says that any attention to group problems, or trying to actively support diversity through representation is actually divisive and discriminatory itself. This, by the way, is why they call liberals un-American. Any attention to group suffering or group needs is divisive in their view. People”
― Derek B. Miller, American by Day

“Do you believe that?” Melinda says, directing her wonderment at Irv. “That if someone commits suicide they go to hell?”
“No.”
“But many Christians do, right?”
“There’s a debate, but it’s doctrine.”
“But you don’t think so?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“For the same reason the Catholics believe in the Trinity, Melinda.”
The appetizers arrive with a speed that Sigrid finds suspicious.
“Which is . . . what?”
“It’s how I understand Jesus’s words spoken from the cross,” says Irv, taking a calamari. “Jesus spoke seven times on the cross. In Matthew Twenty-Seven, verse forty-six and in Mark Fifteen verse thirty-four he says, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ This led to the Trinity,” Irv said, sucking cocktail sauce and grease from his thumb. “The thinking is, if Jesus was Lord, who was he speaking to? He was obviously speaking to someone or something other than himself, unless . . . ya know.” Irv makes a circular cuckoo motion by his head with a piece of squid. “So perhaps he was speaking to the Father, or to the Holy Spirit. In this act, he distinguishes himself from the eternal and embodies everything that is Man. The fear, the sadness, the tragedy. The longing. The recognition of betrayal. We see him, in that moment, only as the Son, and because of that, as ourselves. As I read it, Melinda, we are not invited in that moment to be cruel to him for his despair, or to mock him. Instead we are asked to feel his pain. When Jesus says, ‘It is finished’ I don’t read, ‘Mission accomplished.’ I see a person resigned. A person who has lost hope. A person who has taken a step away from this life. And our pity for him grows. And finally he says, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Now, I’m not going to equate Jesus letting go with suicide, but any decent and forgiving Christian person would have to admit that we are looking at a person who cannot fight anymore. We are being taught to be understanding of that state of mind and sympathetic to the suffering that might lead a person to it. It does not follow to me that if someone succumbs to that grief we are to treat them with eternal contempt. I just don’t believe it.”
― Derek B. Miller, American by Day

“What am I going to do there? I’m an American. I’m a Jew. I’m eighty-two. I’m a retired widower. A Marine. A watch repairman. It takes me an hour to pee. Is there a club there I’m unaware of?”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“the only thing worse than evil was deciding that evil didn’t matter.”
― Derek B. Miller, The Girl in Green